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Friday, November 7, 2008

Stardoll opens up to user generated content - A review of Stardesign

Stardesign taps into the creativity of the communityA first guest post by Cecilia Poon - welcome!

Apart from styling 2D avatars, Stardoll has opened up the door for their users to create their own items. This represents the first move of the rapidly growing community into user generated content. The new creation section is named StarDesign. It allows creation of unique looks for both clothing and interior design items.

You can easily design a nice looking pattern by the StarDesign tools. As shown in the images, pick the shape, colors, size of the pattern you want, rearrange them and create your own image.

If you are one of those who has talent in this area, you can actually design a Hello Kitty with these simple tools, not withstanding the copyright issues that would apply of course.

After that, choose the kinds of furniture you would like your pattern to put on. Stardoll only offers 7 templates at the moment, so you can just choose from sofa, cushion, curtains and so on.

You can then decide whether you would like to purchase the items or not after you design process. Superstars (paid subscription members) can decorate their rooms and MeDoll with the customized items.

However, StarDesign for interior is only available for paid members and those items cannot be sold in their own shop as well. Not surprisingly, there are not competitions for interior designs as well, as their main focus is still in fashion.ConclusionThe main new trend in avatar communities or virtual worlds is to let users create their own items. Take a look at GirlSense, i-Dressup, IMVU, etc. This helps in deepening users experience and also generating millions of new pieces of content for the site. For Stardoll it makes a lot of sense, and it doesn't stop here. We're going to see more players open up more creation tools to their users, both paying and also free. This possibilities of a YouTube model in Avatar Fashion ... it's coming!

Thanks Ceci!

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